Great book review Elan. Zen In the Martial Arts is one of my all-time favorite martial arts books. There are many lessons in it that you can carry with you on your journey. Every great achievement begins in the mind. However, I don’t want that to sound like a cliche. If something seems overwhelming – like 50, 000 pushups – you’ll never accomplish your goal if it’s so overwhelming to you that you can’t possibly see the end. So you first have to break up the elephant into individual chunks; like individual projects. Once the goal seems achievable, positive thoughts come naturally. That’s a skill that takes practice. It sounds like you’re figuring it out.

Breaking it down this way helps. I need to rethink how I practice my katas….. and check my stances… We need to have a horse stance stand-off!

I think sayuchin has these concepts of hard and soft in the kata. There are definitely many horse stances in it.

There is a good reminder of this in our kata that everyone should be aware of. Yang can be characterized by a straight vertical line, while Yin is often represented by a flat horizontal line. When tracing the enbusen (pattern) of Sanchin kata, it moves on a straight North-South line and is representative of Yang while Naihanchi goes East-West and is representative of Yin. Tatsuo Shimabuku was also quoted as saying that Sanchin is like the father and Naihanchi is like the mother to Isshinryu. Interestingly, when we combine those two lines, we get the cross pattern of Seisan. I went into a lot of detail about these different forces in our kata in my 8-codes intensive. I’ll have to teach it again before the year is over.

That face!! 😍😍😍😍

Thanks Cathy. I am still a brown belt. Testing for black belt will be in 12 months January 2025.